Walls that enhance Chicago's cityscape

August 05, 2001|By Elizabeth Alexander. Elizabeth Alexander's third book of poems, "Antebellum Dream Book," will be out in October. She teaches at Yale University.

A Guide to Chicago's Murals

By Mary Lackritz Gray

University of Chicago Press, 488 pages, $70

The great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a poem on the occasion of the summer 1967 dedication of the "Wall of Respect," a South Side mural that featured black heroes and coalesced a community's energies in what Brooks has called the "hot-time" of the late '60s. In "The Wall," she wrote:

Mary Lackritz Gray worships many walls as she chronicles the rich and extensive past and present of Chicago's murals in "A Guide to Chicago's Murals." She presents murals as works of art to be considered aesthetically but also as manifestations of communal vision at different geographies and points in history.

In Chicago, there are murals in banks, post offices, schools, theaters, viaducts, field houses, apartment buildings, churches, even drugstores (a Walgreen's in South Shore) -- in short, anyplace people go about their public business. Gray's book (with a foreword by architecture critic Franz Schulze) can function as a guidebook, as the murals are conveniently arranged according to the quadrants of the city. But the book is also beautiful to look at and indispensable as art history and Chicago history as well.

In her succinct and informative introduction, Gray defines a mural as "an oversized painting, or a composition in mosaic or some other medium, that is an integral part of a wall or ceiling. . . . The murals in this guide were made with the public in mind." She places murals on a visual continuum that unfolds from the likes of cave paintings, stained glass and American Indian pictographs. The earliest Chicago murals were created around the turn of the century at such locations as the Auditorium Theater, the Art Institute, the Field Museum and the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. More murals were painted in Chicago during the Depression than at any other time in history, under the auspices of the Federal Art Project of the WPA. In the country at large from 1935 to 1943, 5,000 artists created some 108,000 easel paintings, 17,700 sculptures and 2,500 murals. This book reminds us of the remarkable and lasting achievements of sustained government encouragement and support of the arts.

Many murals are found in the city's parks, and Gray writes that some were commissioned for the field houses of the South and West Sides with their early-century influxes of new residents in hopes that the murals could be " 'effective agent[s] in making good citizens of [the] foreign population.' " Indeed, commissioned muralists were often encouraged to avoid portraying " 'the calamitous present.' "

Consequently, many of Chicago's murals feature historical scenes with an emphasis on founding and building. The scale of murals also makes them suitable for the heroic, and there is plenty of that. Most Chicago murals are figurative as well, and while some historical moments appear repeatedly (lots of La Salle, Joliet and Marquette), there are also many murals that consider history's foot soldiers.

The book features fine color reproductions of nearly 200 Chicago murals and descriptions or black-and-white photos of hundreds of others. Many murals are by well-known artists: Marc Chagall's glorious "Four Seasons" at the Bank One Plaza, with his characteristic floating figures and dreamscapes rendered in hand-chipped, stone-and-glass mosaics of some 350 hues; Sol LeWitt's geometries in a less-characteristic saturated, dusky palette at the Standard Club; works by Jacob Lawrence and Nancy Spero at the Harold Washington Library Center, and by Alex Katz at the Harlem Avenue CTA station.

The Metra viaduct at 56th Street and Stony Island Avenue features a mural by Olivia Gude and Rolf Mueller in which they tried to create a "community of discourse" by interviewing passersby and incorporating bits of their stories with larger-than-life portraits. There are charming fairies painted in 1938 and '39 at Armstrong School, portraits of Chicago artistic pioneers Carl Sandburg and Louis Sullivan at the Uptown Post Office, and the simulated-stained-glass history of anatomy at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, including canopic jars and protozoa writ large and vibrantly bizarre.

For the cover, Gray has wisely chosen a portion of the breathtaking "Neighborhood People Flocking to the Lord" from the First Church of Deliverance. Fred Jones painted the mural in 1946 and then restored it in 1992 at the South Side church that spawned Nat King Cole and many gospel greats. In long, horizontal murals, believers rendered in intense hues express their faith in varied, vital poses.